The significance of search engine technology is well known, and continues to receive more and more attention in the media. This is because search engines have become an indispensable connection to vast quantities of information for users of the world wide web. Like the Internet browser, a search engine may have millions of loyal users, wherein the leaders in this technology command significant mind share that can be leveraged to advantage in many other applications. Accordingly, intense competition exists between vendors offering search technology solutions.
The store of online information continues to grow exponentially, which in turn places increasing demands upon search engines to work more efficiently and to produce higher quality (i.e. more useful) results. Unfortunately, even in view of search engine technology advances, today's search engines have been unable to accommodate the needs of users in the face of this explosive data growth. It is not unusual for a search engine to return literally hundreds of result pages in response to a keyword search. Unfortunately, the tedious exercise of visiting each site to determine the set of relevant sites of potential interest is left as an exercise to the user. The loss of productivity is substantial, and the frustration of users is unacceptably high.
Prior art search engines limit a user's ability to communicate an accurate representation of the search task to be performed. Many non-topical search characteristics (i.e. any information other than search keywords) that would be desirable to specify are not currently possible. Of those non-topical search characteristics that can be specified, their specification is tedious and error prone. Many desirable non-topical search characteristics are not specifiable since there is currently no defined way for the search engine to determine the presence of the characteristic for any given web page.
There are many “non-topical” aspects of a search that may have a bearing on determining the potential usefulness of a search result. In addition to matching a particular search keyword, other questions of interest may be: Who is performing the search? What is the purpose of the search? Where should the search engine look for results? How often, when and where should the search results be delivered? For example, two different searchers enter the search keywords “root canal.” One searcher is a dentist looking for information on new advances in the field. The other searcher is a dental patient looking for information to provide a basic understanding of the procedure to be performed on her tooth. Both receive the same search results, yet it is apparent that both searchers are looking for entirely different information. If searchers are able to communicate additional information about who they are and the purpose of their search, and if search engines are able to react to such non-topical data, individualized search results of higher relevancy can be realized.
Prior art search engines are unable to accommodate all potentially useful non-topical information in a comprehensive way, instead implementing only a select few options and choices for users to consider. Numerous problems arise when trying to manage a large amount of non-topical data. A comprehensive specification of non-topical data may be tedious and error prone in its specification; furthermore, even if these problems were resolved, the prior art search engines would be unable to determine the affinity of a web page search result to all the numerous non-topical specifications.
For the non-topical aspects of a search that are specifiable in the prior art, a problem arises for a user in establishing their specification. Each time a different type of search is performed, the user must re-evaluate and/or re-edit each non-topical specification prior to initiating the new search operation. This is because there is no convenient way in the prior art search technology for remembering patterns of specifications associated with commonly performed search operations.
Accordingly, there is a great need to provide a way to receive and manage a wide variety of non-topical search specifications that more accurately encapsulate the set of characteristics that make a search result useful to a searcher. Furthermore, there is also a great need to facilitate a user's desire to schedule a search to be performed at a future time, either selected by the user or determined dynamically in accordance with enhancing the efficient utilization of computing resources. In addition to flexibility with scheduling, it is desirable to facilitate delivering search results to one or more specifiable destinations and in a specifiable form. Further still, there is a need to remember patterns of non-topical search specifications associated with types of searches commonly performed by a particular user. A search engine technology that can enhance the relevancy of search results and enhance user productivity will have a significant advantage in the marketplace.